Modern products come with a shocking and every-increasing array of features as producers seek to differentiate their products. This is not only true for consumer goods such as electronics, and home products but also for information products such as banking, insurance, and software offerings. To help users with evaluating competing products, there exist numerous online evaluation services, including ratings engines, review websites, shopping platforms, search facilities, on-line spec sheets, etc.
While such online services provide a tremendous amount of information for the consumer to evaluate competing products within a given category, a significant amount of time and effort is often required to perform such an evaluation. For instance, comparing products can be difficult when different ratings engines or product spec sheets evaluate non-overlapping sets of features. Additionally, some features may only be mentioned in the natural-language text of a review, which requires the user to read many reviews to cull out relevant information.
Furthermore, a given product may have some inherent limitation specific to the user that the user would not have thought of when searching for information, and which would not surface through normal searching/querying about the product.
Moreover, it is currently difficult to identify cross-domain dependencies or interferences of one product with another. For example, product A (e.g., a particular television) may work fine with product B (a particular DVD player), but not work so well with product C (a particular Blu-ray player). In this scenario, such information would be extremely useful for the consumer, but is not readily available.
An additional challenge is that there may be personal attributes, beyond sides the features mentioned within a shopping/ratings website or the producer's spec sheets that cause one particular feature to be a benefit or deal-breaker for a particular shopper. For example, a particular model beach chair may be fine for a petite woman, but not a good selection for a large man.
Given the number of products available in many arenas of life, this kind of complex, contextualized comparison and evaluation is becoming more and more complicated for consumers.